Why Apple?

I do not understand why Apple removed the setting from keyboard layouts to disable dead keys like all other OS do. Usually you could choose between two versions, one with, one without dead keys.

This is pain for developers, because it needs an additional space to type characters like ^~`´.

solution

With a short internet research you'll find some Github projects, that create a new keyboard layout for use on OSX that kill all dead keys (pun intended 😉 ) Here are two I found (for German layout that it):

• https://github.com/sebroeder/osx-keyboard-layout-german-no-deadkeys
• https://github.com/uloco/macos-german-nodeadkeys

Those two are usually already quite helpful, but both are not perfect. One missed out the ~, one missed out the ^. Not a big deal, the single quotes, backticks etc are more important. But sometimes it is a bit annoying.

There is a tool called Ukelele, which is an editor for keyboard layouts. You can do all sorts of thing with it, in my case I just wanted to change the dead keys. It is a bit hard to use, there are some bugs. Last version is from 2022, so I keeps my hopes up, bugs will be fixed some time.

I created a layout:

• download the Zipfile
• after unpacking it, there should be a dir called Deutsch_nodeadkeys.bundle
• move that directory to ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts/ for local installation or to /Library/Keyboard Layouts/ to install it system wide.

After loggin out and loggin in you should be able to find the new Layout in your system settings.